Arts+Culture

The protagonist of The Visitor is Walter Vale, an academic who has retired from life after his wife’s death. A political economist at a small Connecticut college, Walter (played by Richard Jenkins) is no longer engaged with his students. He’s taken a reduced teaching load ostensibly to complete a book, but he’s not writing one.

Looking for a Cowboy

New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, largely inhabited by poor African-American residents, looks not much different now from when the floodwaters receded. You have to wonder how Washington would have reacted if Katrina had hit a wealthy, white gated community.

David Gordon Green’s Snow Angels begins with the discordant sounds of a small-town high school band practicing on a football field under gray skies. It ends with the angry cry of a heartbroken grandmother calling to her dog from a back porch.

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thingAlive enough to have the strength to die. —“Neutral Tones”(Psalm 72))

It won’t last long, this snow that sheathes the dooryard pine in April and laysits feckless cover on the slope behind. Crocuses, just tall enough,poke their small blue noses through. It’s clear that they’re alive enough to live.April’s gale is loud as bombers. What’s left of ice around the pondin town is rough as predators’ teeth. The fisher fells the luckless squirrel.

There’s much I too may try to cover. For all of that I feel a gladnessin watching this omni-inclusive white blot out the neutral tones that pushedour brilliant poet to ponder death, and love’s deceit, its cruelty.We’ve been together, my love and I, near three decades, which have scudded bylike these sideways flakes. My lover-wife. There can come pangs, but the freshets have started

to wander the brush and make their signs: soon we’ll find the trillium,the painted kind, in that secret place which I discovered springs ago,and which since then I’ve kept a secret from all but her—from even our children;and the valley’s white-faced Herefords, while winter endured, dropped new calves,which now, though mud clots up like blood, shine clean as a man’s most colorful dream.

What is this one’s dream? That life go on as ever. That all our lives go on.No more than dream, of course. I know, the planet heating up, the cretinpoliticians waving swords, as if, by counter-logic, warmight transform earth into something more saintly. So many hard facts conspire against me.To know that, though, is to make me cling the harder to gifts that appear to be given

without my having to deserve them. Flowers, beasts, the glinting trees.My disposition, which has moved me here to mute dispute with my great better,in spite of all my darker doubt. Inkling that something will soon come downlike rain upon the mown grass, as showersthat water the earth. Let us praise the Lord,and every weather. Or the smile on the mouth of my lover, which still can blind like snow.

Or the road agent waving from his bright-red plow as it smooths the mud-clotted back lanes over.

Darwinists are communists. And Nazis. They hate our freedom. And—this might be worst of all—they are New Atheists. Or so suggests the film Expelled, Ben Stein’s comedic documentary about scientists who have lost their jobs for questioning the Darwinian consensus. Stein is an actor best known for his role as the hapless teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (“Anyone?

Century Marks

Times a-changin’

Feb 12, 2015

Bob Dylan gave a wide-ranging interview to AARP Maga­zine and declared that if he hadn’t been a musician, he would have been a schoolteacher, and would likely have taught either Roman history or theology (AP).